Born in 1948, Jeremy Brockes was educated at Winchester College and the University of Cambridge (BA Hons, 1969), before receiving his PhD at the University of Edinburgh with Ken and Noreen Murray (1972). He did postdoctoral work with Zach Hall in Harvard and Martin Raff at UCL. He was an Assistant Professor at Caltech, where he discovered Glial Growth Factor, before joining the MRC Biophysics Unit in 1983 where he studied limb regeneration in salamanders. In 1992, he moved to UCL adding studies on prion diseases. He is also a nationally-rated chess player.